If you want success on Walmart, you need to understand how Walmart’s Search Algorithm works – right?
Sounds obvious, but you’d be
surprised…
Most sellers have no idea how Walmart
ranks and delivers search results; let alone how (easily) exploitable it can
be!
Are you ready for a shocking fact?
THREE TIMES as many buyers search
for products to buy on Walmart, rather than Google.
Think about it…
Where do you go when you need to
know if a product is worth buying?
What about when you want the best
deal on anything from a book to a refrigerator?
Walmart…
Yet, you probably don’t pay
attention to it’s search engine – much less consider it as a marketing
channel worth optimizing for. Even most ‘Walmart Marketers’ are still
spending their days trying to optimize their Walmart Listings for Google…
But, what if you knew how to rank in
Walmart instead?
You’d have THREE TIMES more
ready-to-buy customers than you’d EVER get in Google – and you’d do it
in a fraction of the time!
You’re about to read The Ultimate
Guide to Ranking Your Products on Walmart
…
But before we get into the meat of
the matter, here are some basics you should know…
Introducing
A9: Walmart’s Product Search Algorithm
A9 is the name of Walmart’s product
search algorithm. Since this is a guide about ranking products in Walmart, it
makes sense to start at the source. So, this isA9’s official statement for how they calculate search results.
Our work starts long before a
customer types a query. We’ve been analyzing data, observing past traffic
patterns, and indexing the text describing every product in our catalog before
the customer has even decided to search.
Walmart
As we can see here, much of the work
is done before the customer even touches the keyboard. Once the customer
actually hits “Enter” to perform a search, the A9 algorithm delivers results
through a two-step process:
Once we determine which items are
good matches to the customer’s query, our ranking algorithms score them
to present the most relevant results to the user.
Walmart
It’s a pretty simple process at its
core:
- First, they pull the relevant results from their
massive “catalog” of product listings.
- Then, they sort those results into an order that is
“most relevant” to the user.
Now, some of you SEOs out there
might be thinking, “Wait a second… Isn’t relevancy Google’s turf? I thought Walmart
only cared about conversions! What’s all this focus on relevance doing here?”
The answer is simple: Relevance
doesn’t mean the same thing to Walmart that it does to Google. Read this
statement from A9 carefully to see if you can catch the difference:
One of A9’s tenets is that relevance
is in the eye of the customer and we strive to get the best results for our
users. […] We continuously evaluate [our algorithms] using human judgments,
programmatic analysis, key business metrics and performance metrics.
Walmart
See that?
- Google says, “What results most accurately answer the
searcher’s query?”
- Walmart says, “What products is the searcher most
likely to buy?”
The difference between those two
questions is the difference between how Walmart measures relevancy compared to
Google.
On the whole, ranking in Walmart
is more straightforward than Google because you’re essentially cutting the
work in half. This is because there’s no such thing as off-page SEO for Walmart;
they only use internal factors to determine how a product ranks. Backlinks,
social media, domain authority… These are all things you don’t need to worry
about on Walmart.
That being said, there are a few
simple rules you must always remember about Walmart. These 3 rules are
critically important to making the most of this guide, so make sure you read
them twice:
- Walmart’s top goal in everything they do is always maximize
Revenue Per Customer (RPC)
- Walmart tracks every action that a customer takes on Walmart,
right down to where their mouse hovers on the page
- The A9 algorithm exists to connect the data tracked in
#2 to the goal stated in #1
So far, so good?
Core Pillars of the A9 Algorithm
From A9’s website and from the
information that Walmart makes available to us through their Seller Central
(login required), we can group Walmart’s ranking factors into three equally
important categories:
Conversion Rate* – These are factors that Walmart has found have a statistically
relevant effect on conversion rates. Examples of conversion rate factors
include customer reviews, quality of images and pricing.
Relevancy – Remember the first step in the A9 algorithm? They gather the
results, and then they decide how to list them. Relevancy factors tell A9 when
to consider your product page for a given search term. Relevancy factors
include your title and product description.
Customer Satisfaction &
Retention – How do you make the most money from
a single customer? Make them so happy that they keep coming back. Walmart knows
that the secret to max RPC lies in customer retention. It’s a lot harder to get
someone to spend $100 once than $10 ten times. Customer Retention factors
include seller feedback and Order Defect Rate.
*Note
that Walmart uses both predicted and real conversion rates for product
rankings. For example, if your product is priced higher than other similar
products, Walmart will predict a lower conversion rate for your listing and use
that rate until real data corrects it.
Okay! We’re finally ready to start
talking about how to rank product listings in Walmart. What you’ll find below
are 25 Walmart ranking factors that
either Walmart themselves or independent marketers have confirmed the A9
algorithm to use.
Top
25 Walmart Ranking Factors
Walmart isn’t like Google where they
go to great lengths to hide the factors that they use in their algorithm.
Inside Walmart’s Seller Central, they’ll blatantly tell you several of their
top ranking factors. You can also visit theofficial Walmart Seller Support for some great insights. And here’s the Seller Support Blog if you’re interested.
Conversion Rate Factors Sales Rank
After just a couple searches on Walmart,
it should be pretty obvious that number of sales compared to other similar
products – otherwise known as Sales Rank – is one of the most important
rankings factors.
Even now Walmart is testing a new
feature in their search results where they automatically append a #1
Best-Seller banner (see below) to the best-selling product in category-specific
searches, like this one for “Strollers”:
It’s simple really…
More sales mean higher rankings –
and higher rankings mean more sales!
It sounds like a vicious cycle, but
luckily there are still many ways for new sellers to compete.
Customer Reviews
It probably doesn’t need to be said
that the number and positive-ness of your customer reviews is one of the most
important ranking factors in Walmart’s A9 algorithm.
This example product search for the
keyword “vacuum” illustrates some interesting points about how Walmart weights
review volume vs. review quality:
Let’s dissect this search results page:
- The BISSEL vacuum (green) has the most reviews AND the
highest review rating. It’s also the best-seller in its category, so it
ranks at the top.
- The second-ranked Dirt Devil (red) has more customer
reviews, but a lower review rating. It’s also a best-seller, so it ranks
second.
- The third-ranked Shark Navigator (blue) has less
customer reviews, but a higher rating than #2, and it’s also a
best-seller, so it ranks #3.
- The Hoover WindTunnel at #4 has substantially more
customer reviews than any of the top three listings, but it’s not as
highly rated as #1 and #3, and it’s not a best-seller, so it ranks #4.
Answered Questions
This is one of those metrics that Walmart
doesn’t specifically state they track. But, it’s data they have access to and
Q&A’s are listed close to the top of the product page, which typically
means it’s important for conversions.
Furthermore, there products like this (me-approved) Philips Sonicare electric
toothbrush, which ranks #1 for the keyword
“electric toothbrush” over other equally rated best-sellers because it has
almost twice as many customer Q&As than any other listing in the category:
Image Size & Quality
Walmart continues to tighten their
image size and quality policies for product listings. Right now, some
categories won’t even display results that don’t have at least one image that
is 1000×1000 pixels or larger. These are called “suppressed listings”.
The 1000×1000 pixel image size
allows Walmart to offer customers their Hover-to-Zoom feature, shown below,
which they’ve found has a dramatic effect on conversion rates.
Awful artistry aside, you can see
that as my cursor hovers over the image, Walmart automatically displays a
zoomed-in version in the product information pane.
Notice that image quantity is not
what’s important here. This Tippmann paintball
gunis the #1 product for the keyword
“paintball guns”, but it only has one image. Since the image is big enough and
informative enough to give the customer all the info they need, that’s all it
takes to make Walmart happy.
That means it’s better to have one
large, high quality image than to have multiple normal-sized images. Not to say
that multiple images won’t convert better than one image, just that the
benefits quickly taper off after the first.
Price
Remember earlier when we talked
about how Walmart’s A9 product search algorithm uses both predicted and real
conversion rates to determine which products to show in their search results?
One of the biggest factors Walmart
uses to determine predicted conversion rate is pricing – they know that
customers tend to seek the best deals. More importantly, Walmart uses pricing
as a major factor in picking which product to show in the buy box, which is the
part of the page containing the Add to Cart button (we’ll talk more about that
later).
Notice here that the top-ranking
product for the search term “juicer” has less customer reviews, lower customer
reviews and lower Sales Rank than every other listing in the top 4. It still
shows #1 because it’s got decent ratings and is priced waaaaay below the
category average.
Note that customer reviews are still
vital here. And pricing isn’t the only reason that the Black & Decker
Juicer ranks #1…
Parent-Child Products
Many sellers create multiple
listings for variations of the same product. This is suboptimal. It’s much
better to use Walmart’s built-in parent-child product functionality to direct
all customers to a single product page.
This has several benefits:
- It maximizes your customer reviews, since Walmart will
combine your similar products into a single primary product page
- It makes the most sense from a UX standpoint; keeping
customers on the same page makes it more likely they’ll buy your product
- Walmart has shown a preference for ranking products
with multiple options in their listing
Let’s look at that top-ranking Black & Decker Juicer again:
If you scroll back up the page,
you’ll see that this juicer is the only one in the top 4 results to utilize
parent-child product connections. When you enable the parent-child relationship,
it shows as an extra option in Walmart’s search results…
This not only increases
click-through rates, we can see here that it also helps you rank above the
competition!
Time on Page & Bounce Rate
Remember, Walmart can measure every
way a customer interacts with their website, so it’s easy for them to track
detailed time on page and bounce rate stats.
Here’s exactly what these
similar-but-different metrics mean on Walmart:
Time on Page: Walmart believes that the amount of time a customer spends
on your listing page is a good measure of how interested they are in your
product. A customer who reads your full product description, looks through
reviews and investigates the Q&A’s is much more likely to buy than the one
that spends a couple seconds skimming the features.
Bounce Rate: A “bounce” is when a customer performs a search, visits
your page, and then either goes back to the search results or clicks on a
Related Product offer. Keep in mind that Walmart has a much more exact
measurement of bounce rate than Google, again, because all user activity
happens within their platform.
Product Listing Completeness
Finally, the last conversion metric
to optimize for is listing completeness. The individual sections of the product
listing mostly have to do with relevancy, as you’ll learn below, but the actual
completeness of the listing has an effect on conversion rate.
As a general rule, the more complete
you make your listing, the better. Do your best to fill in every single field
in the listing setup page to maximize your chances of appearing at the top of
product search results.
Relevancy Factors Title
Optimizing your product title for Walmart
is an excellent example of the way that optimizing for Walmart differs from
optimizing for Google.
In Google, you want a concise,
engaging title with your keyword close to the beginning.
In Walmart, all you care about is
keywords. You want to cram as many keywords into about 80 characters as you
possibly can.
In fact, you can actually go beyond
80 characters if you want, and it’s better to have too many keywords than too
few. I’ve seen top-listed products with titles that make no sense and have over
200 characters, like this top-rated “Nexus
charger”:
It should be noted that Walmart is
starting to crack down and standardize Product Titles – keep an eye out for
this moving forward…
Features / Bullet Points
The other big reason that particular
Nexus charger ranks so highly is because it has lots of keyword rich,
informative features. Features, which are displayed as bullet points right
below the pricing and product options, are an absolute must.
Just like with images, Features are
so important that Walmart no longer allows productswithout bullet points
to be featured in the buy box, and not having them is a serious road-block to
good Walmart rankings.
Another good example of proper
Feature usage is this Asus computer
monitor, which ranks #1 for “computer
screen”:
Notice how the bullet-points are
both extremely detailed and include a ton of keywords? At the same time,
they’re easily readable, which means they won’t confuse customers and risk
hurting conversions.
Product Description
Your product description is
basically where you expand on your Features. It’s also the part of the page you
have the most control over. If there’s anywhereto really put a lot of effort
into engagement, it’s in the product description.
That being said, keep in mind that
unlike with Google there is no benefit to having a keyword appear
multiple times on the product page; if it’s anywhere in your product
listing at least once, you will be relevant to rank for it.
If you want to see a truly
appetizing product description, check out the one for this DeLhongi Espresso Maker – the #1 ranked listing for the term “espresso maker”.
There’s nothing advanced about this
product listing – they just covered all the bases. It’s thorough, inviting,
easy to skim, includes plenty of images, captions, and they even included extra
tech. specs that aren’t listed in the normal Specifications section (which
we’ll talk more about below).
Brand & Manufacturer Part #
Remember earlier when we looked at
the top results for the keyword “Juicer”? You can refresh your memory below:
Something that every single one of
the top listings do right in that category is list the brand and manufacturer
number first in the product title. In fact, if you do the search yourself it’s not until the 15th result that Walmart
shows us a product listing without the brand and manufacturer number
included in the title.
You always, always, always want to
include a brand in your title because it enables your product for search
filters AND allows you to capture customers searching for a specific brand. And
if you’re in a niche where customers are using the manufacturer number to
search for products, you definitely want to include that keyword in your
title.
Specifications
These are different than Features –
this is the part of the page where you actually list the technical and physical
details of your product. This includes size, shipping weight, color,
publication date (if you’re doing books), tech. specs and more. You can see this top-ranked product for the “home theater system” search term using their
product specifications to the max:
Category & Sub-Category
You probably didn’t realize this,
but once a customer has entered into a category – every other search they
perform on Walmart will, by default, be limited to that category.
Take a look at the example below:
You can see here that a simple
search for “dog food” actually takes us three categories deep into Walmart’s
product catalog, indicated by the red lines in the image above. The blue box
shows that we’ll stay in the Dog Food category until we either return to the
home page or manually tell Walmart to show us All Departments.
When setting up your product
listing, make sure you put your product in the most relevant, narrow category
possible.
Search
terms
In addition to categories, you can
also specify search terms that you want associated with your product.
Even though Walmart lists five
different 50-character search term fields, you’re better off thinking about it
as one big 250 character text box in which you can enter every possible search
term you can think of for your product.
This is somewhat complicated to explain,
and I can’t do a better job than Nathan Grimm has
already done over at Moz (it’s about 1/3 of the way through this
article), so just head over there if you want to learn more about this specific
factor.
Source
Keyword
This is one of the biggest hidden
ways that Walmart determines a listing’s relevance to a given product search.
This is also yet another example of how Walmart tracks every single minutia of
a customer’s activity on their website. Take a look at this URL that
links to a listing for a Black & Decker electric drill, and see if you can
tell me what search term I used to find it:
http://www.Walmart.com/Black-Decker-LDX172C-7-2-Volt-Lithium-Ion/dp/B005LTNLDI/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1416351135&sr=8-1&keywords=electric+drill
You can see the source keyword right
at the end of the URL – &keywords=electric+drill – that tells Walmart that
the source keyword was “electric drill”.
Therefore, if I were to buy this
drill, Walmart would know that this listing is highly relevant for the term
“electric drill”. The next time a customer searches for that term, this listing
would be more likely to show at the top.
Here’s a neat little Walmart ranking
hack you can do to take advantage of this factor:
- Construct a URL for your product listing using the
[&keyword=your+keyword] query (append the code inside the brackets to
your product URL).
- Use a link shortening service like bit.ly to create a
shareable link to that URL.
- Drive traffic to the shortened link.
Now anytime you make a sale from one
of these shortened keyword links, you’re basically tricking Walmart into
thinking that these visitors performed a product search for your target
keyword.
Customer
Satisfaction & Retention Factors
Negative
Seller Feedback
Why do I list negative seller
feedback specifically, as opposed to just seller feedback in general?
Interestingly, Walmart actually
claims not to track positive seller feedback; at least, not for the sake
of their product search algorithm.
Instead they track negative
seller feedback rates, or frequency. It doesn’t matter how bad the feedback
is – all negative feedback is the same, and it all counts against you equally
in terms of search result rankings.
To be clear – as a third-party
seller attempting to win the buy box (shown below) you want your seller
feedback as high as possible. However, negative feedback rate is the
only metric with a known effect on product search results.
Order
Processing Speed
Walmart knows that one of the best
ways to make customers happy is with fast and accurate shipping. Therefore, a
vendor or seller who has shown consistent and efficient order processing is
more likely to rank higher than a vendor who’s had complaints of inaccurate or
slow shipping.
In-Stock
Rate
Customers hate it when they
want a product but can’t have it.
One of the most common ways this problem occurs is when an item is out of
stock, or when a seller doesn’t keep proper track of their inventory.
Whether you’re a first-party vendor
or a third-party seller, keeping up your inventory is vital to maintain top
rankings, both in A9’s product search results and in your product’s buy box.
Two of the big customer satisfaction
metrics are Percentage of Orders Refunded andPre-Fulfillment
Cancellation. In both cases, Walmart has found that vendors/sellers with
low in-stock rates tend have higher refunds and cancellations, which of course
is bad for customer retention.
Perfect
Order Percentage (POP)
POP is a measurement of how many
orders go perfectly smoothly from the time that a customer clicks “Add to Cart”
to the product arriving at their home.
If you have a high Perfect Order
Percentage, that means you have a high in-stock rate, accurate product listings
and prompt shipping. That’s exactly what Walmart wants for each and every one
of their customers, so they’ll naturally rank high-POP sellers above lower-POP
ones.
Order
Defect Rate (ODR)
ODR is basically the opposite metric
of POP.
Every time a customer makes a claim
with an order, that’s considered an order defect. Here are some of the most
ways an order can defect:
- Negative buyer feedback
- A-to-Z Guarantee claim
- Any kind of shipment problem
- Credit card chargeback
Each of those examples by itself
would count towards your Order Defect Rate, which is the number of order
defects compared to the total number of orders fulfilled over a given period of
time. Walmart says that all sellers should aim for an ODR under 1%.
Important! Buyer-removed negative feedback does not count
towards your ODR. So, it really pays to address each and every one of your
customers’ issues.
Exit Rate
How often does a customer view your
listing and then exit Walmart.com? That’s your exit rate.
If your page has an above average
exit rate, Walmart takes that as a sign that you have a low-quality listing.
Usually a high exit rate is because your product has a low in-stock rate, or
because your listing isn’t fully complete.
Packaging Options
This is a metric that I didn’t used
to think Walmart measured, but recently I’ve been seeing stuff like this in
product search results:
Clearly packaging options are
something that Walmart has found their customers care about. But, even if it
weren’t, it’s a great way to separate your listing from other similar products
(and rank higher through an increased conversion rate).
An easy way to do this – seen in the
example above – is to use Fulfillment by Walmart to offer Frustration Free
Packaging. This is where Walmart uses less packaging and fully recyclable
materials without sacrificing product protection. You can read more about it here.
Too Long; Didn’t Read
This post is getting dangerously
close to 4,000 words, so I know that a lot of you probably won’t read it all.
That’s okay – I’ll forgive you with
time
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